ADDRESS

BY

THE MOST HON. THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY,

K.G., D.C.L., F.R.S., Chancellor of the University of Oxford,

PRESIDENT.

My functions are of a more complicated character than usually is assigned to the occupants of this Chair. As Chancellor of the University it is my duty to tender to the British Association a hearty welcome, which it is my duty as President of the Association to accept. As President of the Association I convey, most unworthily, the voice of English science, as many worthy and illustrious Presidents have done before me; but in representing the University I represent far more fittingly the learners who are longing to hear the lessons which the first teachers of English science have come as visitors to teach. I am bound to express on behalf of the University our sense of the good feeling towards that body which is the motive of this unusual arrangement. But as far as I am personally concerned, it is attended with some embarrassing results. In presence of the high priests of science I am only a layman, and all the skill of all the chemists the Association contains will not transmute a layman into any more precious kind of metal. Yet it is my hard destiny to have to address on scientific matters probably the most competent scientific audience in the world. If a country gentleman, who was also a colonel of Volunteers, were by any mental aberration on the part of the Commander-inChief to be appointed to review an army corps at Aldershot, all military men would doubtless feel a deep compassion for his inevitable fate. I bespeak some spark of that divine emotion when I am attempting to discharge under similar conditions a scarcely less hopeless duty. At least, however, I have the consolation of feeling that I am free from some of the anxieties which have fallen to those who have preceded me as Presidents in this city. The relations of the Association and the University are those of entire sympathy and good will, as becomes common workers in the sacred cause of diffusing enlightenment and knowledge. But we must admit that it was not always so. A curious record of a very different

state of feeling came to light last year in the interesting biography of Dr. Pusey, which is the posthumous work of Canon Liddon. In it is related the first visit of the Association to Oxford in 1832. Mr. Keble, at that time a leader of University thought, writes indignantly to his friend to complain that the honorary degree of D.C.L. had been bestowed upon some of the most distinguished members of the Association : The Oxford Doctors,' he says, 'have truckled sadly to the spirit of the times in receiving the hodge-podge of philosophers as they did.' It is amusing, at this distance of time, to note the names of the hodge-podge of philosophers whose academical distinctions so sorely vexed Mr. Keble's gentle spirit. They were Brown, Brewster, Faraday, and Dalton. When we recollect the lovable and serene character of Keble's nature, and that he was at that particular date probably the man in the University who had the greatest power over other men's minds, we can measure the distance we have traversed since that time; and the rapidity with which the converging paths of these two intellectual luminaries, the University and the Association, have approximated to each other. This sally of Mr. Keble's was no passing or accidental caprice. It represented a deep-seated sentiment in this place of learning, which had its origin in historic causes, and which has only died out in our time. One potent cause of it was that both bodies were teachers of science, but did not then in any degree attach the same meaning to that word. Science with the University for many generations bore a signification different from that which belongs to it in this assembly. It represented the knowledge which alone in the Middle Ages was thought worthy of the name of science. It was the knowledge gained not by external observation, but by mere reflection. The student's microscope was turned inward upon the recesses of his own brain; and when the supply of facts and realities failed, as it very speedily did, the scientific imagination was not wanting to furnish to successive generations an interminable series of conflicting speculations. That science-science in our academical sense-had its day of rapid growth, of boundless aspiration, of enthusiastic votaries. It fascinated the rising intellect of the time, and it is said-people were not particular about figures in those days-that its attractions were at one time potent enough to gather round the University thirty thousand students, who for the sake of learning its teaching were willing to endure a life of the severest hardship. Such a state of feeling is now an archæological curiosity. The revolt against Aristotle is now some three centuries old. But the mental sciences which were supposed to rest upon his writings have retained some of their ascendency even till this day, and have only slowly and jealously admitted the rivalry of the growing sciences of observation. The subject is interesting to us, as this undecided state of feeling coloured the experiences of this Association at its last Oxford visit, nearly a generation later, in 1860. The warmth of the encounters which then took place have left a vivid impression on the minds of those who are old enough to have witnessed them. That much energy was on

that occasion converted into heat may, I think, be inferred from the mutual distance which the two bodies have since maintained. Whereas the visit of 1832 was succeeded by another visit in fifteen years, and the visit of 1847 was succeeded by another visit in thirteen years, the year 1860 was followed by a long and dreary interval of separation, which has only now, after four-and-thirty years, been terminated. It has required the lapse of a generation to draw the curtain of oblivion over those animated scenes. It was popularly supposed that deep divergences upon questions of religion were the motive force of those high controversies. To some extent that impression was correct. But men do not always discern the motives which are really urging them, and I suspect that in many cases religious apprehensions only masked the resentment of the older learning at the appearance and claims of its younger rival. In any case there is something worthy of note, and something that conveys encouragement, in the difference of the feeling which prevails now and the feeling that was indicated then. Few men are now influenced by the strange idea that questions of religious belief depend on the issues of physical research. Few men, whatever their creed, would now seek their geology in the books of their religion, or, on the other hand, would fancy that the laboratory or the microscope could help them to penetrate the mysteries which hang over the nature and the destiny of the soul of man. And the old learning no longer contests the share in education which is claimed by the new, or is blind to the supreme influence which natural knowledge is exercising in moulding the human mind.

A study of the addresses of my learned predecessors in this office shows me that the main duty which it falls to a President to perform in his introductory address, is to remind you of the salient points in the annals of science since last the Association visited the town in which he

is speaking. Most of them have been able to lay before you in all its interesting detail the history of the particular science of which each one of them was the eminent representative. If I were to make any such attempt I should only be telling you with very inadequate knowledge a story which is from time to time told you, as well as it can be told, by men who are competent to deal with it. It will be more suitable to my capacity if I devote the few observations I have to make to a survey not of our science but of our ignorance. We live in a small bright oasis of knowledge surrounded on all sides by a vast unexplored region of impenetrable mystery. From age to age the strenuous labour of successive generations wins a small strip from the desert and pushes forward the boundary of knowledge. Of such triumphs we are justly proud. It is a less attractive task--but yet it has its fascination as well as its uses-to turn our eyes to the undiscovered country which still remains to be won, to some of the stupendous problems of natural study which still defy our investigation. Instead, therefore, of recounting to you what has been done, or trying to forecast the discoveries of the future, I would rather draw your attention to the condition in which we stand towards three or

four of the most important physical questions which it has been the effort of the last century to solve.

Of the scientific enigmas which still, at the end of the nineteenth century, defy solution, the nature and origin of what are called the elements is the most notable. It is not, perhaps, easy to give a precise logical reason for the feeling that the existence of our sixty-five elements is a strange anomaly and conceals some much simpler state of facts. But the conviction is irresistible. We cannot conceive, on any possible doctrine of cosmogony, how these sixty-five elements came into existence. A third of them form the substance of this planet. Another third are useful, but somewhat rare. The remaining third are curiosities scattered haphazard, but very scantily, over the globe, with no other apparent function but to provide occupation for the collector and the chemist. Some of them are so like each other that only a chemist can tell them apart: others differ immeasurably from each other in every conceivable particular. In cohesion, in weight, in conductivity, in melting-point, in chemical proclivities they vary in every degree. They seem to have as much relation to each other as the pebbles on a sea beach, or the contents of an ancient lumber room. Whether you believe that Creation was the work of design or of inconscient law, it is equally difficult to imagine how this random collection of dissimilar materials came together. Many have been the attempts to solve this enigma; but up till now they have left it more impenetrable than before. A conviction that here was something to discover lay beneath the persistent belief in the possibility of the transmutation of other metals into gold, which brought the alchemy of the Middle Ages into being. When the immortal discovery of Dalton established that the atoms of each of these elements have a special weight of their own, and that consequently they combine in fixed ponderable proportions from which they never depart, it renewed the hope that some common origin of the elements was in sight. The theory was advanced that all these weights were multiples of the weight of hydrogen-in other words, that each elementary atom was only a greater or a smaller number of hydrogen atoms compacted by some strange machinery into one. The most elaborate analyses, conducted by chemists of the highest eminence-conspicuously by the illustrious Stas-were directed to the question whether there was any trace in fact of the theoretic idea that the atoms of each element consist of so many atoms or even of so many half-atoms of hydrogen. But the reply of the laboratories has always been clear and certain-that there is not in the facts the faintest foundation for such a theory.

Then came the discovery of the spectral analysis, and men thought that with an instrument of such inconceivable delicacy we should at last find out something as to the nature of the atom. The result has been wholly disappointing. Spectral analysis in the hands of Dr. Huggins and Mr. Lockyer and others has taught us things of which the world little expected to be told. We have been enabled to measure the speed with which clouds of blazing hydrogen course across the surface of the sun :

we have learnt the pace-the fabulous pace-at which the most familiar stars have been for ages approaching to or receding from our planet, without apparently affecting the proportions of the patterns which as far as historical record goes back they have always delineated on the evening sky. We have received some information about the elementary atoms themselves. We have learnt that each sort of atom when heated strikes upon the ether a vibration, or set of vibrations, whose rate is all its own; and that no one atom or combination of atoms in producing its own spectrum encroaches even to the extent of a single line upon the spectrum that is peculiar to its neighbour. We have learnt that the elements which exist in the stars and specially in the sun are mainly those with which we are familiar upon earth. There are a few lines in excess to which we can give no terrestrial name; and there are some still more puzzling gaps in our list. It is a great aggravation of the mystery which besets the question of the elements, that among the lines which are absent from the spectrum of the sun, those of nitrogen and oxygen stand first. Oxygen constitutes the largest portion of the solid and liquid substance of our planet, so far as we know it; and nitrogen is very far the predominant constituent of our atmosphere. If the earth is a detached bit whirled off the mass of the sun, as cosmogonists love to tell us, how comes it that in leaving the sun we cleaned him out so completely of his nitrogen and oxygen that not a trace of these gases remains behind to be discovered even by the sensitive vision of the spectroscope?

All these things the discovery of spectrum analysis has added to our knowledge; but it has left us as ignorant as ever as to the nature of the capricious differences which separate the atoms from each other, or the cause to which those differences are due.

In the last few years the same enigma has been approached from another point of view by Mr. Newlands and Professor Mendeléeff. The periodic law which they have discovered reflects on them all the honour that can be earned by ingenious, laborious, and successful research. The Professor has shown that this perplexing list of elements can be divided into families of about seven, speaking very roughly: that those families all resemble each other in this, that as to weight, volume, heat, and laws of combination the members of each family are ranked among themselves in obedience to the same rule. Each family differs from the others; but each internally is constructed upon the same plan. It was a strange discovery-strangest of all in its manifest defects. For in the plan of his families there were blanks left; places not filled up because the properly constituted elements required according to his theory had not been found to fill them. For the moment their absence seemed a weakness in the Professor's idea, and gave an arbitrary aspect to his scheme. But the weakness was turned into strength when, to the astonishment of the scientific world, three of the elements which were missing made their appearance in answer to his call. He had described beforehand the qualities they ought to have; and gallium, germanium, and scandium, when they were discovered